Off the Shelf: George Georgiou’s Turkey

From the founding of the Ottoman Empire, in 1299, to the current negotiations to accede to the European Union, the country we know as Turkey has had a complicated history. “There are different interests in play in Turkey, from secularism and Islamism to the traditional and the modern, as well as between democracy and repression—often in unlikely and contradictory combinations,” the photographer George Georgiou explains. “It is these contradictions my work addresses and the complexities of a large country that was a former imperial empire searching for a modern identity.” Georgiou’s work on Turkey, where he moved in 2003, first came to my attention at the Open Society Institute, when it was selected for Moving Walls. Now, nearly three years later, it has evolved into his début book: “Fault Lines: Turkey East/West.”

It began with an idea of divided communities, something Georgiou had explored in previous work on Serbia and Kosovo. “I wanted to move the project away from the idea of conflict to that of a nation caught between ideologies,” Georgiou writes. “Turkey is caught between East and West in terms of Europe and the Middle East, and I was interested in Turkey’s role in this dynamic. Often the approach photographers take to Turkey is exotic and ‘orientalist,’ fairly narrow and reinforcing a sense of the ‘other.’ I really wanted to make a contemporary story about Turkey.”

Though the book opens with a map of Turkey and a timeline of the country’s history, the next hundred and thirty pages are devoted to photographs alone (captions are relegated to the final pages of the book, and there is no text by Georgiou or others). It seems that Georgiou wants us to just spend time looking, to see the contemporary Turkey that he discovered. Here’s a selection to get you started.

In the cover image for the book, a woman cycles past a Turkish fighter jet mounted by the seafront in Mersin, commemorating the invasion of Cyprus. “Turkey is undergoing huge change and a lot of the work is about that change. The changes are many: economic, social, political—and the landscape,” Georgiou writes in an e-mail from Ukraine, where he’s finishing another book, about that country and Georgia.